Salvatore Bizzarro, professor emeritus of Spanish and Portuguese, was one of eight children born to a school teacher mother and a theatre director father, and whose grandfather owned a circus. Born in 1939 in Tunis, Tunisia, he spent his childhood years in Italy before emigrating with his family to the United States at age 15.<\/p>\n
\u201cI came here as an immigrant, with no English skills at all,\u201d he explains. \u201cI was placed in high school in a machine shop class, but I always loved language and reading. We\u2019d come to the U.S. because Italy was in such awful shape after the Second World War.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bizzarro\u2019s love of creative words and work is in his blood, and he would eventually amass a library of more than 6,000 books in his CC office.<\/p>\n
Following high school, Bizzarro became a language teacher to help other immigrants gain the skills and cultural know-how to assimilate to the U.S. easily. International learning has been a part of Bizzarro\u2019s world from an early age, and this combination of exposure and experience led him to consider a career in journalism before turning his life to teaching.<\/p>\n
At Fordham University in New York in the 1960s earning his bachelor\u2019s degree, Bizzarro threw himself into anything related to Latin America \u2014 from geology to economics. At Stanford University, where he earned his master\u2019s and Ph.D., he honed his study and research all the more, with his Ph.D. focusing in Hispanic American literature.<\/p>\n
\u201cChile, and the work of Pablo Neruda, became a huge part of my life,\u201d he explains. Bizzarro\u2019s thesis for that same Ph.D., titled \u201cSocial and Political Themes in the Poetry of Pablo Neruda,\u201d formed the backbone of his second published book, \u201cPablo Neruda: All Poets the Poet\u201d (1979). His first was \u201cThe Historical Dictionary of Chile,\u201d (1972).<\/p>\n
Following his Ph.D. in 1969, Bizzarro launched a career in academia as a teacher, mentor, and scholar. He arrived at Colorado College in the fall of 1969, as an associate professor of Romance languages, a year before the Block Plan officially launched.<\/p>\n
Initially not planning on staying long at CC, he ended up staying until full retirement in 2019. What changed his plans, as it so often does for many, is that he found firm and fast friends. That sense of community spurred on Bizzarro\u2019s teaching and development. A year after he arrived, CC launched the Block Plan, and while Bizzarro came to enjoy and cherish the pace of learning it offered, he was initially skeptical.<\/p>\n
\u201cI thought it would be detrimental to learning and retaining language skills,\u201d he explains. That\u2019s why, \u201cwith other colleagues, we launched the adjunct programs across the language departments to help students with their upkeep and skill maintenance. It was vital that we taught languages on the first- and second-year level, not just to upper-level students with previous skills.\u201d<\/p>\n
The adjustment to the Block Plan was \u201cchallenging but really fun,\u201d and Bizzarro was able to hone his craft at home and abroad.<\/p>\n
However, nothing quite beats the truly immersive experience of studying a language, a culture, in the space and place where they originated. Bizzarro\u2019s premiere legacy at the college is the full internationalizing of CC\u2019s study abroad programs, culture, and opportunities \u2014 which continue to shape experiences, memories, and lives.<\/p>\n
As the founder with History Professor Arthur Pettit of the CC in Mexico program in Cuernavaca in 1971 (later switched to Guanajuato and Oaxaca), Bizzarro and members of the Romance languages faculty ran the program for 37 years until 2008. His Italian in Italy program, where students take two blocks of Italian language classes while experiencing the sights, sounds, tastes, and smells of the country, ran for 22 years. He ran film and literature classes in Chile with Chilean author Antonio Sk\u00e1rmeta for 12 years, and, with his wife Kathy Bizzarro, went to Spain to inquire about setting up the Spanish in Spain Program, a creation by his wife who ran it as director for 12 years. The program still runs today in Soria, operated by Professor Carrie Ruiz.<\/p>\n
Bizzarro\u2019s connections across the literary and political circles of Central and South America, as a result of his research, travel, and publication, bore fruit at home in Colorado at CC, as well.<\/p>\n
Bizzarro helped bring to the college authors Carlos Fuentes, Elena Poniatowska, and Isabel Allende, as well as Azar Nafisi and author and PBS news personality Charlayne Hunter-Gault; political figures such as former president of Costa Rica and Nobel Peace Prize winner Oscar Arias Sanchez, and former U.S. presidential candidate and activist Ralph Nader; and activists such as Winona LaDuke and Anna Deavere Smith.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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